A Whole World, Bit by Bit
by Dipenates
Summary: Back from his road-trip, Josh thinks about politics. And Sam. Episode tag for 4.1-2 "20 Hours in America".


**A whole world, bit by bit**

Josh, sitting in his office with the stink of a twenty hour road-trip still on him, knew without being told that Sam had written those words.

CNN was on in the background – _God, when was the last moment that he'd had indoors when the news wasn't on in the background, like some spoken word version of muzak – _and they were playing clips of the President's speech.

It was the cadence that had first caught his ear, but it was the sentiment that told him unequivocally that it was Sam's. It wouldn't have mattered if Toby hadn't been with him as they'd schlepped back from Iowa; writing almost nothing, hands itching for spaces bigger than the margins of the newspaper in which to wield his pen. Of everyone who worked in the White House only Sam could have ever put those words together; stringing the verbs and adjectives together to create something so stirring, so genuinely beautiful.

At times of death and destruction the President liked his words to gleam with the sheen of hope, and he was right there on the TV in the corner of Josh's office, pumping hope out into the atmosphere like a chimney-stack.

"_Yet the true measure of a people's strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive. _

"_44 people were killed a couple of hours ago at Kennison State University. Three swimmers from the men's team were killed and two others are in critical condition. When, after having heard the explosion from their practice facility, they ran into the fire to help get people out." _

On the screen, the President paused, and looked out into an audience in Vera Wang and Benson & Clegg.

"_Ran _into_ the fire". _

And all of a sudden Josh felt like he needed to be with people, to talk about what had happened at Kennison State and on the road. About standing, dripping with rain in a chain hotel lobby, and watching disaster unfold on the TV screen in the corner. About ethanol, and dry rub, and ways to make college tuition a little cheaper, a little easier.

He walked out into the Communications bullpen, and Sam wasn't there. Sam wasn't wandering around with his bowtie undone, like Dean Martin after a show at the Sands. Sam wasn't standing next to one of the assistants' desks with the easy slouch of his shoulders and the tilt of his hips belying the awesome responsibility of being the President's voice of hope on a night like this.

And Josh realized that it wasn't someone to talk to that he wanted, but _Sam_ to talk to.

There was a bottle of Sam Adams in the fridge in Josh's office for moments like this, and Josh unscrewed the cap and flipped it into his garbage bin.

"_The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless." _

They'd drunk Sam Adams everywhere they could find it on the campaign trail. Somewhere, scribbled in a notebook, Josh and Sam and Danny Concannon had kept a tally of the different types of cap in different places. Old school caps in San Francisco. Screw lids in New York.

CJ and Toby had been there for some of their discussions about policy and tactics and messaging, and so had Leo, but tonight the only face that he could remember tonight was Sam's. Could only picture Sam's mouth, hard against the neck of the bottle.

They'd started off talking about the Governor and the campaign. They'd ended up talking, like college freshman, about everything. Families and ideas and books and films. Tastes and preferences and the news and childhood TV shows. Speechwriting and policy formulation. Talking and talking until they were half-nauseous with too much caffeine and too little sleep. And Josh had realized that, above everything, Sam was shiny with hope.

Sometimes, in the middle of articulating a position on the Middle East, or a rewrite of a section of the stump speech, Sam would catch Josh's expression and duck his head. Like a child caught, by the school bully, in the act of bringing his teacher an apple, he was ashamed of his own open-heartedness. Josh had tried to explain that Sam was better off never acquiring his particular brand of cynicism, but that had just sounded like so much inside-the-Beltway dimestore sophistry, and Sam had shrugged his shoulders in the way that unmistakably said that he wanted Josh to change the subject.

If Sam gave people too much credit, then there was a studied brutality to what Josh did; a misjudgement of the extent to which people were bad.

He sometimes wondered what he was doing this for. He'd always wanted to work in professional politics; to work at the White House. To do that he'd had to pick a side, and then another until he couldn't even bring himself to shape the word 'bipartisan' with his tongue, because everything had been about making a choice and not a compromise.

Metaphorically, he twisted arms until they broke, and it wasn't such a stretch, sometimes, to imagine doing it for real. Because he knew that grown men cried when he left their offices, and they may as well have been crying over broken bones as the tatters he had reduced their careers to.

The blinds in his office were closed, but that didn't change the fact that outside the window was a whole city full of people that smiled when he failed. Democrat or Republican, one of the few things they could probably agree on across the District was that the President's hatchet man was a pain in the ass. Tonight, he wanted to talk to Sam and have him smile and not frown. Wanted to make a better world, rather than just run plays that made them all less instead of more.

"_This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. God bless their memory, God bless you and God bless the United State of America." _


End file.
